


Another Beast Born

by xathira



Series: Prince of the Unknown [1]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Angst, Beast Wirt, Body Horror, Brotherly Love, Freeform, Other, Prince Wirt, Sacrifice, Transformation, but also fluff, greg - Freeform, this idea has been in my head for years now so welcome to the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 05:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21030746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira
Summary: In some versions of the story, the older brother grows antlers.  He saves his brother but carries the lantern; rescues the bird but belongs to the Unknown for all eternity.  Misery consumes him.  He becomes a monster.In another version of the story, the older brother grows antlers… and becomes a prince.





	1. 🙞One🙜

_In some versions of the story, the older brother grows antlers. He saves his brother but carries the lantern; rescues the bird but belongs to the Unknown for all eternity. Misery consumes him. He becomes a monster. _

_In another version of the story, the older brother grows antlers… and becomes a prince._

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜 

Wirt’s stomach clenches at the sight of an Edelwood leaf fluttering from the corner of Greg’s mouth. Branches bracket his little brother’s body like greedy fingers about to curl into a fist. Wirt tears at the bark until his fingernails chip and his palms blister but he can’t bend even a _twig._ Beatrice’s voice stokes the panicked acid in Wirt’s stomach as she flits above them both: “Aw jeez, they’re even growing inside him…”

Wirt chokes as if _he’s_ the one with roots crawling up his throat. “N-no, they can’t be… I’m too late? Greg?”

The spunky kid spits out the oaken-shaped leaf and offers a weak laugh. Wirt feels as if he’s the one who mashed those dark circles into Greg’s eye sockets. “Nah, I was just eatin’ leaves…” He sags into the wood cradle consuming him. When he starts coughing again—another dry, veiny leaf—Wirt realizes that was a lie. With a shaking hand, he nudges back the collar of Greg’s shirt and sees dark tendrils sunken into his brother’s neck like roots burrowing into soil, seeking water. “Wirt?” Garbled around the stuff rasping up the back of Greg’s teeth. “You’re making my shirt all wet. Are you… okay?”

Wirt is not okay. His little brother is being consumed by this evil, starving forest and there’s nothing he can do and it’s all his fault. He wipes his eyes but it’s no use. He doesn’t feel Beatrice land on his shoulder. Doesn’t hear her murmuring awkward attempts at comfort for him and Greg. Wirt doesn’t even look up at the sensation of shadows gliding over his back… the sudden chill sinking into the still forest air… he’s wrapped his arms as best he can around Greg’s limp body, pleading for forgiveness, deaf to his brother’s shriveled cries of protest and numb to the urgent prick of Beatrice’s tiny claws digging through his cloak. It isn’t until a radioactive glow burns the ground that Wirt swallows hard and looks up—

Into the haunting eyes of The Beast.

Terror makes Wirt rigid. The jagged silhouette woven into the woods cocks its head at him, and the shadow of its antlers slice over his body. “Too late for tears, boy,” says the rich and pitiless voice. It shifts forward, seeming to move _through_ the trees it lurks behind. Wirt can hear Beatrice’s heartbeat thrumming. Greg spits out another leaf. 

“Th-there _has_ t-to be something I can do, please,” Wirt begs. The bluebird is chirping frantically at him now—her wings batting at his face to draw his stare away from those too-bright stars blazing from the twisted trunks—only Wirt doesn’t care, because the only thing more terrifying than the creature in the darkness is the sickening reality that Wirt has _fed Greg to it._ “Please, _please..._ l-let him go…”

The next part has been repeated in many timelines, though now the events have slightly changed. The Woodsman arrives with the lantern. He attempts to free an unconscious Greg from the greedy Edelwood with his axe, but more tendrils grow where others are cut. The covetous Beast sneers at the hapless humans and their pointless efforts—reminds the Woodsman about the waning spirit of his daughter—and the old enemies grapple, leaving Wirt with the lantern. 

The clarinet player has just warily lifted the lantern’s handle when the Woodsman is flung at his feet, groaning and defeated. Beatrice is nestled protectively on Greg’s faintly moving chest. The Beast prowls closer, sucking the warmth from the atmosphere, the air from Wirt’s lungs. It is a void. Wirt knows it will swallow him alive. But… as it speaks to him, offering the deal he’d been begging for earlier… Wirt notices something in the way The Beast glares covetously at the lantern. For the first time in his life, he thinks, Wirt shows the strength of his spine. He refuses the option The Beast has dangled: him becoming the lantern-bearer in exchange for keeping Greg’s lost soul alive. 

His response, when The Beast asks if he is ready to see _true_ darkness, cracks only a bit. “Are _you?_”

Wirt flicks open the lantern’s window. In the snarling blur of The Beast stretching toward him—desperate to stop him—he glimpses a horrific mass of haunted faces all twisted together, hollow eyes and silently shrieking mouths, a singular being built from plural miseries, branches and bone, and with breath he wants to use to scream Wirt instead blows out the lantern’s dancing flame.

An earsplitting screech detonates in the woods. The Beast’s glowing eyes go dead the instant the flame is extinguished. Its outline writhes—shatters—and is nothing more than splinters and leaves twirling to the ground. Wirt blinks in total blackness… until, gradually, ambient light limns the Unknown once again and he can see his shaking knuckles still gripping the metal handle. 

“Wirt?” Beatrice peeps. She still quivers on Greg’s chest and spreads her wings over him as the Woodsman stirs stiffly, blinking at where The Beast had stood and the now empty lantern Wirt holds.

The old man makes a pained, heartbroken noise. “What have you done, boy? My daughter… her soul...”

“Wait,” Wirt interrupts gently. The relief of defeating that monster makes his shoulders sag. “That… wasn’t your daughter. The Beast was manipulating—” His heart lurches. His free hand goes to his sternum, clutching together the buttons of his cloak. He tries to speak, and a strangled scream rips from his teeth instead. The Woodsman, bewildered by what Wirt had been trying to say but still worried about this poor lost foolish boy, fumbles forward in time to catch him as Wirt jackknifes at the waist, retching. 

His ribcage is being carved out like the guts of a pumpkin. Snot and tears and drool mix down his face. The Woodsman has an arm wrapped around his chest supporting him while he dry-heaves into the mud, and Beatrice’s blue feathers blur in his vision, yet Wirt focuses on Greg still tangled in the Edelwood—

A force stabs _through him_ and Wirt lets out a raw moan—

He goes boneless. Whatever made him _himself_ is not inside of him anymore. He senses it tumble away from him like a leaf on the wind… and then snag, a chain linked to the inside of his ribs, and with a fragile flicker the lantern relights on the ground where he dropped it. 

He has somehow collapsed to all fours, Beatrice peering up at him from the forest floor and the Woodsman holding him by the shoulders. Both of them go quiet at the sight of the new flame smoldering in the clearing. Wirt blinks—and when he does, the places where his eyes sweep are lit up with preternatural blue. He knows what happened. Instinctually. An overwhelming urge pushes him to pick up the lantern again and cradle it next to where is heart used to beat. He crawls out of the Woodsman’s support and to Greg instead.

“Greg? Hey…” His voice is thick. It’s rough with a texture that wasn’t there before. He puts his palms on either side of his brother’s face. The roots draining Greg shrink back… recede… the little tyke takes a true, deep breath, cracking open his bruised eyes, and the mixed expression of confusion and fear on his face tears at Wirt. The pilgrim starts methodically yanking branches off of Greg’s body—each twig now snapping easily, obediently—until Greg is free. “Let’s get you out of here. Don’t forget Jason Funderburker.” He manages to maneuver Greg onto his back and starts walking in a direction that just seems _right._

Nobody stops him from hiking past the oaks and aspens and Edelwoods, although Wirt hears the Woodsman following him and Beatrice’s wingbeats right behind. At some point, a glimmer that isn’t the lantern or the moon—or the odd burn coming from Wirt’s own irises—forms an outline before him. Wirt slides Greg off his back and coaxes him to step closer to the light.

“Go on. I’m right behind you.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“Wirt, you can’t.” Beatrice whispering in his ear. Wirt waves her off, spinning Greg around to face away from him. 

“It’s all right, Greg. I’ll catch up...”

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

_I’ll catch up._

That’s what Wirt had said. And even though his eyes hurt to look at, and he didn’t sound right, Wirt was still his brother and Gregory trusted him. He walks through the beckoning hole in the woods…

And resurfaces, hacking up water and soaked to the bone. Blue flashes that he mistakes for Wirt’s eyes at first and slashes of red daze him. Sirens yowl from every corner. There are strong arms pulling him from the lake which Greg fights at first, until the nice police officer tells him to calm down, it’s all right, let’s warm you up. They wrap him in blanket after blanket and have him sit, shivering, in the back of an ambulance, where he can watch people wading into the water with flashlights, calling his brother’s name. “He’s coming,” Greg says past chattering teeth to Jason Funderburker, the frog crouched close beside him. “He said so.”

But the blue flashes on the water’s gleaming face are only from the police cars. And when it becomes clear to the search party that it is better to take the surviving brother to the hospital, this little boy who is barely awake and mumbling deliriously about monsters and bluebirds, Greg is driven away and they still haven’t rescued Wirt yet. They don’t recover his body all night. Or the next day, with divers swimming through the reeds where both boys had been tangled. 

They never find Wirt at all.


	2. 🙞Two🙜

The Unknown needs a Beast. The Unknown _is_ The Beast. And to survive—for the forest to continue existing, for the days to turn, for everyone to carry on their lives in this mysterious limbo—The Beast’s lantern must remain forever lit. 

To keep burning… The Beast’s soul needs fuel. People have to die for good. They have to die in pain, alone, and hopeless, for the Edelwood to take root and turn their blood into black sap. The woods are one vast graveyard in which The Beast eternally prowls for more prey. 

If allowed to carry the lantern himself, however, The Beast cannot be trusted not to devour everything in his path—ravenous for despair. He would bleed the Unknown dry. Consume the land that bound him until there is nothing left. The lantern is his soul and his shackle, requiring a warden. Somebody to delay the entropy closing in from every side… so many rules in order to keep the tenuous balance of the Unknown. And all of them unfair—because what is fair about sacrifice for the sake of more torment? What can possibly be good about a place built on abandoned bones and glutted on death? 

Why was the price for saving his brother becoming a monster?

If Wirt extinguished the lantern himself _again,_ what would happen? Would he be released? Would the Unknown vanish with the flame—snuffed into nothingness?

He tries. The Woodsman already has the lantern when Wirt stumbles back from sending off Greg, his lungs cinched shut in time with the glimmering outline that released his brother. There is futile struggling and swearing and more begging, Wirt clawing at the Woodsman’s arms and then hanging from the Woodsman’s coat as he sobs brokenly on his knees on the ground, crying so hard that he cannot speak, cannot breathe. 

The sky grows darker in response to the new Beast’s anguish. Snow drifts over the skeletal branches above. Beatrice dares to land on his quaking spine, curling herself against the nape of his neck. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs to the back of his head. “At least… at least Greg will be okay. You saved him, Wirt. You… you did good.” Tiny bluebird eyes glare up at the Woodsman, daring him to contradict her. 

“I d-did?” A question echoed by the blizzard wind howling over naked twigs, Wirt’s voice muffled in the rough wool of the Woodsman’s coat. He waits for reassurance to fill the abyss in his chest. For something to soothe the terrible, unbearable emptiness. The only warmth that reaches him—that calls for him mournfully—comes from the lantern which the Woodsman is holding out of reach. 

His hat must have fallen off without Wirt realizing it, because in the next heartbeat there is a callous palm resting on his crown. 

Wirt flinches from the contact. He lets go of the Woodsman to wrap his arms around himself, hiccuping, wanting nothing more at this moment than to be left _alone._ He’s always dealt with grief this way. And when brambles sprout up around Wirt’s hunched frame, embracing him in thorns that force the Woodsman to step back and Beatrice to take to the air, he gets his wish. 

The old man carries Wirt’s soul away without another word. A new chapter has begun in the Unknown.

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: This is a series with a happy (or at least happy-er) ending. 
> 
> Happy Spooktober!
> 
> Bonus track: "Drive" by Britta Phillips


End file.
